I used to know a girl called Fiona who kept a joint diary with her friend Katherine. They wrote it most evenings in the desolate hours between the end of John Craven's Newsround and the arrival of the ice-cream van on their housing estate, a period marked by the combustion of chip pans in the kitchens of the negligent, pans then carried hurriedly onto doorsteps and thrown into the air like torches at a Viking funeral. Fiona's favourite book was Wuthering Heights and Katherine was always trying to grow her hair: their genius they put into the diary, which was all about how much they wanted to kill their fathers, and, more violently, how much they loved the heavily lipglossed singer in a band called Japan.

David Sylvian was his name. The girls called him David. So far as I remember, the diary was a pretty spectacular fantasia of adolescent lusts and local hatreds:

Dear Katherine, David came and took me out of my bed last night and we went for a long walk in McGavin Park and he kissed me in the carpark but I didn't let him go all the way, not like that Morag McGregor in 104 who does it with anyone.

Dear Fiona, I wasn't going to tell you this, but David borrowed some of my Toyah make-up last night and I told him he was a two-timing bastard and then we both cried and made up. We decided the three of us might have to run away to London Town before the summer.

LRB 4 March 2004 | PDF Download